💬 “We're starting to understand much more about human activity on the oceans in general, not just the fishing activities, which is very exciting.” @Nick Wise

This is a conversation with Nick Wise

🎙️ Nick is CEO at OceanMind and a pioneer of Tech for Good. He is at the forefront of deploying technology to help address some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Nick created OceanMind to help protect the world’s oceans. Humans are exploiting the oceans at an alarming rate, damaging ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and enslaving others to do it. At OceanMind they use satellites and artificial intelligence to empower enforcement and compliance, helping authorities to enforce regulations more effectively, and seafood buyers to make more responsible buying decisions. This combination of enforcement and economics helps drive behavioural change on the oceans, increasing sustainability and encouraging responsible practices.
Three billion people derive their protein from seafood. One in eight people depend on the sea to earn their livelihood. The ocean is crucial to the global carbon cycle, shuttling gigatons of carbon each year between the atmosphere and plankton. The ocean regulates our weather and our climate. We need the ocean to survive.

Yet the ocean is under dire threat from human activity and the relentless effects of climate change. UNESCO estimates that 60% of the world’s major marine ecosystems have been degraded or used unsustainably. Thousands of ocean species are threatened with extinction.

Nick is now growing OceanMind to tackle these issues at the global scale, building on the successful deployment of AI to identify fishing activities, we are now building models to detect human trafficking and modern slavery in fisheries, and to identify suspected illegal salvage activities over protected undersea war graves and sites of cultural heritage.

Healthy oceans are essential to human wellbeing, and the damage being done puts us all at risk. Intact ecosystems provide far greater resilience against the ravages of climate change, and the oceans provide half of the oxygen that we breathe. It is vital that we do all we can to protect the oceans for all our futures.

This is the Infinite Leaders series on the Boundless Podcast, they are exploring how Digital Transformation, Data and Artificial Intelligence can promote, provide engagement and deliver environmental sustainability.